Album Introspective: In Crushing, Julia Jacklin Sweats The Details And Is A Better Person For It
Tristan Young @talltristan
The ending of an relationship is usually depicted as a gut wrenching trauma or stab through the heart. We don’t always absorb its impact in terms of dozens of inconveniences and peripheral frustrations. Julia Jacklin’s 2019 LP Crushing makes the argument that maybe we should. Jacklin’s narrative is born from her time on tour throughout her native Australia, ruminating on the decision to end an relationship, and the myriad unforeseen consequences that her decision brought upon her life. Rather that speak of heart break, she focuses on how she is forced to re define her self in ways she never thought she would have to consider. This experience is disorienting, gruelling, and wrought with anxieties. Crushing eschews theatrical melodrama for something more subdued, harder to render in clear terms, but ultimately something much more relatable. In doing so, her understanding of why these decisions have to be made, and why the can be so devastating, reveals a person capable of grasping the value of teachable moments. She becomes someone we not only empathize with, but can admire.
“The Police met you at the plane, they let you finish your meal”, Jacklin opens her album with, in the ominous and slow burn ‘Body’. She recounts a story, one seemingly in a long line of grievances, of her partner once again caught up in criminality and misanthropy. The steady procession of low key, thunderous piano and elegiac guitar strings forms a melody of inevitably. Just as this rhythm follows one inexorably straight path, so to do her thoughts and their unavoidable conclusion. “I’m going to leave you, I’m not a good woman when you’re around”. As soon as she acknowledges the urgency to excise this person from her life, so does the cascade of repercussions begin to flood in.
Jacklin wonders if a photograph of her that he still has can be weaponized against her. “It’s just my life, and it’s just my body”, she sings with resigned cynicism. That’s just the beginning. As the album progresses, rather than grieving and moving on in a vacuum of personal memory and emotion, Jacklin is inundated with supplemental issues created by ending her relationship. She wonders if their mothers should still be friends in ‘Don’t Know How To Keep Loving You’. The question of listening to that band or going to that restaurant that he once recommended is the focus of ‘You We’re Right’. Does she send him a music video he may like? How will he interpret such a gesture? Will he even care? All of these thoughts intersect in a dense thicket of anxiety during ‘When the Family Flies In’.
Most pressing among these issues, and the hardest one to approach, is who Jacklin is supposed to be now that she is no longer part of this relationship. The album goes to great lengths to articulate how unfair it is that a person loses their own identity when paired with another, and beautifully documents the arduous struggle to reclaim one for herself. Simple questions of “who will I be now that your no longer next to me”, in ‘Don’t Know How To Keep Loving You’, give way to less existential but somehow more daunting questions in ‘Pressure To Party’. Is she expected to meet someone if she goes out with friends? If not, why is she even going? Is it fair to ask that question of her and not of someone comfortably unattached or in a stable relationship? No it’s not- and yet she feels that pressure to contextualize everything she does in those terms. That stress is rendered in gloriously chaotic and rollicking style as “Pressure To Party” is one of the few true bangers of the album. Its frantic zeal coalesces into the emotionally devastating line, “What do I do, ‘cause god how it hurts”.
Elsewhere the spacious, even vacant, rhythms of anemic tempo and minimalist instrumentation give her thoughts little to hide behind. There is a contemplative grace in her piano and string arrangements in tracks like ‘When The Family Flies In’ and ‘Convention’, one that is confident and calm at adorning her perpetual struggles and failures for all to see. When she does energize the beat a little, such as in ‘Head Alone’ and ‘You Were Right’, her chord progressions are very reminiscent of Real Estate. This seems appropriate as theirs is a band that dwells less upon existential grandeur and more on the enormity of small, domestic concerns. It’s a great style to emulate. While the melodies may seem a bit wearisome, it’s thematically important. If ‘Body’ is derived from a place of darkness, and her perceiving a need to remove herself from it, the next track ‘Head Alone’ is one of of blossoming and liberating energy in terms of its compositional structure. “Pressure To Party”, by far the most kinetic of the album, is an over stimulated spiral into isolation and doubt. The rest of the album is a slow but confident climb out of those depths. Some tracks are sedate but represent progress. ‘You Were Right’ has an uptick in momentum and optimism, even defiance, signifying a light at the end of the tunnel. Yet it’s an uneven journey, and the rhythms and structures effectively represent the steep and unforgiving climb, one with terrain doing everything it can to halt one’s advance.
That sense of interference and disorientation can be gruelling; a war of attrition against concepts that are intimidatingly ubiquitous. Jacklin, in the face of this obstruction, details how the process of moving on simply wears her down. It gets to the point where she considers the relative ease of simply acquiescing to the cold functionality of returning to such a toxic relationship. This adds an implicit undercurrent or risk to Crushing. She hides from her family when they join her for support, slipping into the glow of a phone screen while camped out in the car at night. “I don’t care for the truth when I’m Lonely, I don’t care if you lie”, Jacklin admits with resignation amidst a concurrently ponderous guitar jaunt in ‘Good Guy’. The multi faceted gauntlet of tying up all these loose ends swells with oppression and she hints of cowering before it.
The looming spectre of impending defeat coalesces into Crushing’s emotional core with “Turn Me Down”. Eccentric guitar strings build the melody, as if just a touch of derangement had permeated Jacklin’s by now battered psyche. Yet at her most vulnerable, she doesn’t succumb this temptation, instead turning to any means to over come it. As her tenor is initially rendered in its most airless form she quietly begs, “why won’t you just turn me down”. She keeps asking, over and over. With the guitar building in ferocity and output, she no longer begs, she starts demanding. One way or another she will find away for this to end. As she stares once again into an abyss of uncertainty she this time finds finality, in her own subversive way. “Look at the center line, maybe I’ll see you in a super market sometime”. There will never be a clean break, a conclusive end, but Jacklin knows she can muster the stamina to exist in that perpetual ‘after’. She knows where that will eventually lead, to the two of them one day seeing each other, and simply not caring.
Crushing provides no grand catharsis. Its emotional peaks are deeply effecting but are ones that successfully define dilemmas, not solve them. Yet Jacklin emerges victorious by accepting the ambiguities of the perennial messy break up. The countless fibers that tethered her to another person cannot be cut at will. They will continue to inform her sense of identity. But those tethers will at some point erode. One day she can go to a party simply because she wants to, or listen to a band with no further connotation. Until then, Jacklin can carry the baggage. Her destination eventually lies beyond it.